First Published: HART ENERGY July 26, 2021
By Adriana Citlali Ramirez and Sindre Jansen, TGS; and Eirik Larsen, Earth Science Analytics
Earth Science Analytics and TGS have combined the power of machine learning
and historical data with the modern Utsira OBN survey.
The North Sea is reaching its full maturity. Despite modern technology, new economic discoveries have become
scarce. A significant portion of the oil and gas fields in this area will reach the end of their economic life cycle within a decade. There is not much expectation in discovering huge fields in such a mature area, but sustainability of the expensive existing investments depends on marginal discoveries, which offer opportunities for clustering and aggregating new volumes.
When the goal is to identify highly valuable barrels nearby existing infrastructure, new technologies provide the ability to use historical data to extract insights that could not have previously been gained without investing large resources (e.g., time, personnel and compute). The output from the well-based property prediction study, the 3D-property prediction models and the automatic seismic interpretation provide invaluable new insights that can fuel further exploration of this prolific area, especially when this new information is analyzed side by side with modern processed data and high-end velocity models derived with ultralong-offset diving wave and reflection DM-FWI.
An inline crossline and depth slice in the Utsira OBN show the velocity (DM-FWI) anomalies associated with the injectites. Modeled Injectites using machine learning are overlain in red. (Source: TGS and Earth Science Analytics)
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